


Who Needs Sleep?

by pocky_slash



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Established Relationship, Gen, Insomnia, M/M, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 12:56:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8752426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocky_slash/pseuds/pocky_slash
Summary: Night three of Charles' insomnia is starting to drive him a little batty. Luckily, he has a mansion full of teammates to help.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onceandfuturemoose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onceandfuturemoose/gifts).



> Happy Secret Mutant! I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title after the Barenaked Ladies song from like, 1997, because I am Old On The Internet.
> 
> This is a post-First Class, Beach-Divorce-Never-Happened teamfic, which I haven't written in a long time. It was a delightful genre to revisit!

Charles has just about given up on late night television when he senses Moira's approach. He must be even more tired than he realizes if he's missing the spark of minds waking up a mere floor above him. Good god, he needs to get some sleep soon.

"Charles?" she asks. She's wrapped up in an old terrycloth robe, her hair in complete disarray. A very vain part of Charles that can't be quashed no matter how hard he tries laments the fact that she very obviously no longer considers him someone she needs to impress; when she first moved in, she always made sure her hair was brushed and her make-up was on before she sought out Charles, even though Erik was rarely more than a few rooms away from him, even though she was much more interested in their mysterious government contact than she was in him.

Ah, well. It is what it is, as his thesis advisor used to say.

"Moira," Charles says, nodding in greeting. "Are you having trouble sleeping?"

"Are _you_?" Moira asks. She raises her eyebrows pointedly and Charles shrugs.

"Night three," he says wryly. "I wish I knew what it was. A shot of whiskey didn't even help, so I'm out of ideas."

"And Erik's away, so there's no fucking you gently to sleep, I guess," Moira muses. Charles can feel his face heating up.

"Quite."

"Nothing on tv?" she asks.

"No, nothing worth watching and nothing boring enough to put me to sleep."

Moira crosses her arms and taps the fingers of her right hand on her left elbow. Her red nail polish glints in the light from the television.

"Warm milk," she finally says. "Warm milk with honey. My mom's favorite cure for insomnia."

"I'll try anything at this point," Charles says, and Moira needs no further encouragement to sweep off to the kitchen. Charles flicks off the television and glances at the pile of grading on the coffee table. Last night he tried to bore himself into sleep with essays. It didn't work at all and he's vaguely afraid he took his frustration out on the students whose work was the subject of that experiment.

Moira returns a few minutes later with two steaming mugs. She sits down on the couch next to Charles and hands one to him, then taps hers against it.

"Cheers," she says. "You'll be dozing off in no time."

"I certainly hope you're right," Charles says.

They drink in silence. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Twenty-five.

"It's really not working?" Moira asks around a yawn. Charles shakes his head sadly. "Not even a little?"

"Not even a little what?"

They both turn to see Alex standing in the doorway of the living room. Angel and Raven and Armando are there too, right out of view. Another slew of minds that Charles has missed--if he doesn't get sleep soon he's going to start to become an active danger to the school's safety. He and Hank really need to get to work on a better security system--they won't be able to rely on Charles' telepathy forever.

"Charles can't sleep," Moira tells them, which Alex takes as invitation to enter the room, the rest following close behind. They're all dressed in street clothes. Angel and Raven's hair is ruffled and windswept. A closer inspection of Alex's mind reveals that he's still vaguely stoned.

They're all adults, really. He shouldn't be judging them for a night out. But it's night three of no sleep and the part of him that would normally feel forgiving has long since been swept away by general discontent.

"Oooh," Raven says. "Erik's not here to--"

"Yes, we've discussed that already," Charles says curtly.

"You try counting sheep?" Alex asks.

"Yes."

"My mamá used to heat up some milk and add a little sugar and a little cinnamon--" Angel starts to say, but Moira shakes her head and holds up her mug.

" _Our_ mother used to take a slug of whiskey," Raven says.

"I attempted that earlier," Charles admits.

Raven plops down onto the couch on the other side of him. She smells of marijuana smoke and cheap beer--not unlike the way she sometimes smelled when they lived in Oxford. It's comforting in a nostalgic kind of way, but not enough to make him any sleepier, alas.

"Classical music," Armando suggests. He heads to the record cabinet before he's even finished speaking. "Used to tune into the classical station all the time when I was in school and couldn't stop my brain from running for long enough to sleep."

"I'll try anything," Charles says.

He expects the children to return to bed, but they settle into the living room. Alex and Armando share the other sofa and Angel sits at Raven's feet. The choice of music is lovely--Bach, he thinks, maybe "Air on a G String." Something soft with strings that has Alex snoring by the end and Raven yawning against his shoulder.

Charles, however, is still awake.

Emma's presence he feels as soon as she wakes. He follows her down the stairs and into the living room. She's curious as to why so many of them are awake at this hour, curious and a little wary. It's been over a year, now, since the incident in Cuba, and no matter how many times Charles tries to demonstrate how welcome she and her two friends are at the school, there's still a divide between Shaw's former people and Charles' group of students.

"I can't believe you'd have a party and forget to invite me," she says. She's trying to read Charles--he can feel her cool slide into his mind--and he gives in and lets her see what's bothering him. "Can't sleep, then."

"No," Charles says.

"And Erik--"

"Yes, Erik is not here, so sex is off the table," Charles says, perhaps a little sharply. Still. It's bad enough that they all nose into his private life all the time by virtue of living in the same small space--he doesn't need them to speculate to his face.

"And warm milk and music and television and Scotch," Emma continues, flipping through his memory. "Huh. Have you eaten anything?"

"Not since dinner," Charles says. "I thought digestion was supposed to hamper sleep."

"Warm bread used to put me out," Emma says. She hesitates for a moment and Charles can feel the pull of reluctance. The part of her that struggles to keep her heart encased in diamond wants her to stop right there. The part of her that longs to be a part of something manages to push onward, though. "My nanny--when my sisters and I would be up at all hours, she'd bring us warm bread and butter. Not toast, just--warm bread. Real bread, homemade, of course, not store bought nonsense full of chemicals."

"We made bread yesterday," Raven says. Angel elbows her calf. "Angel made bread yesterday and I mostly didn't make a mess of the kitchen while she worked," she amends.

"Well," Charles says with a helpless shrug, "why not?"

He's not surprised, by this point, that they all head into the kitchen together, a quiet huddle moving through the dark and silent halls of the house. Charles still moves through the house as if his mother or Kurt is going to catch him out of bed, but perhaps it's not his childhood fear, but something about the house that inspires it. Most of these people have only known the mansion as a place full of boisterous life, but they're all moving with the same softness. Maybe it's the lateness of the hour. Maybe it's the exhaustion they're all fighting to hold at bay until they find a solution for Charles' problem.

Inside the kitchen, Angel pulls the fresh bread out of the bread box and hands it over to Emma. It's a little strange, watching her move about the kitchen. She's taken a more hands-off role at the school so far, cultivating her aura of cool indifference. Seeing her in her long white satin dressing gown moving about the kitchen with a purpose is a little jarring. It's also a little sweet.

Emma slices enough bread for all of them, then looks consideringly between the oven and the cluster of them gathered around the kitchen table.

"Darwin?" she asks, and Armando laughs as soon as he realizes what she wants. Still, he dutifully joins her at the counter. His hand glows red hot and he holds it briefly over each slice of bread until little wisps of steam curl off of them and the butter on top melts into a puddle. Emma thanks him and spreads the butter, then hands out a piece to each of them.

They eat in silence. Alex yawns and rests his head against the table. The silence drags on.

"So," Raven says eventually. "Is it working or--"

The bread was warm and delicious and the company made him feel more at home in the house than he has in a long time, even in the days since they've converted it into a school. And yet....

"No," he says.

They all groan in unison.

There's a flash behind them, a cloud of sulfur, and then Azazel and Janos have joined them as well.

"I smelled food," Janos says around a yawn. He looks expectantly to Angel, who gestures to Emma. Janos' eyebrows climb towards his hairline. Emma makes a very unladylike gesture in response.

"Charles can't sleep," Moira says. "We tried warm milk, classical music, counting sheep, whiskey, warm food, and Erik's not here to--"

Charles sighs before she can finish. Azazel snickers.

"You are going about this all wrong," Janos says. "What you need is movement. Rocking. There is a reason we rock our babies to sleep." He holds out his palm and a tiny whirlwind appears. "I can help?"

"No tornadoes indoors!" Raven, Moira, and Alex say in unison. That had been an unfortunate accident that Charles doesn't think anyone will ever entirely forget. The house will certainly never be the same. Oh well--Charles never liked that wing anyway.

"Besides," Moira says slowly, "we have a better option."

***

The half-finished underground laboratories are a stark contrast to the warmth of the mansion. The muted yellow light has been replaced by stark white and chrome. Their footsteps echo through the empty halls, through the rooms that will one day be full of labs and classrooms and training rooms, but are now mostly half-finished wrecks of wiring and metal panels.

At the end of the hall is the hanger, where the Blackbird sits in darkness. Next to it is a small private jet, one with the school's logo on the side, a plane befitting an eccentric millionaire who started a private school on a whim.

"Inside, everyone," she says, because now it's a mission for all of them, some sort of quest they need to complete. Charles would be touched if he wasn't so damn tired.

They buckle into the seats in a cluster, Charles, Raven, and Angel facing Emma, Alex, and Armando, with Azazel and Janos just across the aisle. The plane hums as it comes on, and shakes as the hanger door is opened. Raven closes her eyes for take-off, and before long they're flying through the night, the sky fading into a soft lavender as dawn approaches. 

"Wow," Armando says. "That's something." The clouds stain the sky with patches of dark purple. The trees and houses far below them are all asleep. The roads are empty. It's just them and the stars and the clouds and the sky.

It's beautiful.

Charles is not tired at all.

One by one, his companions drop off--Raven onto his shoulder and Angel onto hers. Armando and Alex collapse into a pile against each other. Janos snores lightly, stretched out across three seats. Azazel props his ankles on Janos's lap and reclines his chair. Emma's head tips backwards, her mouth open with an undignified line of drool making its way down her cheek.

Charles taps his fingers against his thighs and watches the world go by in a blur of blue and purple and lilac and pink.

Eventually, the plane turns back around and Moira lands back in the hangar. The rest of them sleep through the landing, sleep even through Moira joining them back in the cabin and sighing loudly.

"No luck, huh?" she asks. Charles shrugs.

"Well," she says. "Might as well start the day. We can leave these guys to their sleep. Want help with your grading?"

"Desperately," Charles says. He eases himself out of his seat, gently shifting Raven to rest on the chair he vacated. 

"I'll throw some blankets on them and meet in your office?" Moira suggests, and Charles nods.

He walks back through the labs, takes the elevator back to the main floor, walks quietly across the house and situates himself behind his desk. He's barely started on the first essay when the phone on his desk rings loud enough that he accidentally drags his pen all the way across a paper.

He fumbles to shove it under his ear. "Ah, yes--Xavier School, Professor Xavier speaking."

"Charles."

The tension that Charles has been carrying in his shoulders for three days bleeds out all at once. "Do you know how early it is?"

"You're awake, aren't you?" Erik's voice is wry and a little mean and desperately missed.

"Yes, well, I've been awake for three days."

"Still can't sleep?"

"Obviously." He can hear the snobby curl of his voice and forces himself to relax. "We had quite an adventure this evening. Team bonding in an attempt to get me to sleep. Most of them blame you, you know."

Erik laughs. "Well, I can think of a few ways to tire you out."

"It's not nice to tease when you're a continent away," Charles says. "How is it going in Europe?"

Erik launches into a detailed description of what he's managed to accomplish since the last they spoke. Recruitment seems to be going well, information gathering is going even better, and Charles rests his head on the desk as Erik drones on about the shoddy security of foreign intelligence agencies. 

The light outside is bright as the sun rises and he squints his eyes closed, humming along occasionally to Erik's story.

Erik has a lovely voice.

He's not sure how long it is until Moira joins him in the office, he just feels the phone being wiggled out of his grasp. He wants to snatch it back from her but--well, that seems like a lot of work and he's quite comfortable where he is.

"Yeah, he's out," he hears her say to someone. "Mm hm, I'll pass that on. Finish up soon and get home, he's crabby when you're away and I don't think we can take another week of his insomnia."

Charles wants to defend himself, but when he opens his mouth, all that comes out is a yawn. It drains all of his energy. That's okay. He can't remember what he was so mad about, anyway.

He shifts a little to get more comfortable and goes back to sleep.


End file.
